FAMOUS FABLES

INSURANCE: A tenor who had auditioned for Gatti-Casazza, the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, waxed indignant when the latter suggested that he was not ready for the Met.

"Not ready!" he exclaimed. "Why, when I was with La Scala, they thought so much of my voice, they insured it for $100,000!""Oh, and what did they do with the money?" said Gatti.

DREAM: Robert Louis Stevenson was tormented by frightening dreams, which were as vivid as they were spine-tingling. One night, his dream was so scary that he cried out in his sleep. Alarmed, his wife wakened him.

"Are you all right?" she anxiously inquired. "You seemed to be having a nightmare."

"It was one indeed," said Stevenson, in a sweat, "a blood-curdling nightmare which I must put into words at once."

Getting out of bed, he turned up the lamp and went to his desk. He set down everything that had occurred in the dream. The finished work he called "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde."